AMD Releases SDK for Its 'Llano' Fusion Chips

The new SDK is designed to encourage developers to tap into the capabilities in the latest A-Series Fusion chips for mainstream desktops and notebooks.

Advanced Micro
Devices is rolling out a software development kit for its Fusion processors,
giving developers access to its new chips that integrate high-level graphics
and the CPU on the same piece of silicon.
AMD's APP
(Accelerated Parallel Processing) SDK v 2.5, released Aug. 8, enables
developers to leverage the technology found in the chip maker's A-Series Fusion APU chips-formerly code-named
"Llano"-which were released in June. AMD officials have dubbed the Fusion chips
that offer the integrated GPU and CPU as APUs, or accelerated processing units.

The vendor
released the first of the Fusion chips at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in
January. The Llano chips are aimed at mainstream desktops and notebooks. The earlier
Fusion chips focused more on lightweight notebooks and the embedded market. AMD
officials say the A-Series APUs offer high-end HD graphics, supercomputer-like
performance and the company's All-Day battery-life capabilities.

With the SDK,
AMD is hoping developers embrace the new Fusion technology and the
cross-platform OpenCL programming language, which is designed to enable
programmers to write an application once, and have it work on a number of
different computing devices. The more developers write to OpenCL, the wider the
adoption of AMD technology, according to company officials.
"Improving
performance and programmability on AMD platforms is a key initiative for us,
and we work closely with developers to help us make the APU the best possible
development platform," Manju Hegde, corporate vice president of AMD's Fusion
Experience Program, said in a statement. "With these latest SDK refinements, we
are supporting continued growth of the ecosystem and building on the momentum
generated by the successful AMD Fusion Developer Summit held in June."
AMD launched
its Fusion chips at CES at the same time Intel launched its Core processors
with the "Sandy Bridge" micro-architecture, which also features graphics
integrated with the CPU. The aim of these GPU-CPU chips is to increase
performance while also ramping up energy efficiency. During separate conference
calls with analysts and journalists last month to discuss their respective
second-quarter financial numbers, executives with both AMD and Intel said the
ramp ups of their new chips were among the best in their companies' histories.

Since the
beginning of the year, AMD has sold 9 million of its "Brazos" processors, which
are designed for lightweight notebooks and netbooks. The ramp for the Llano APUs is unfolding even
faster, according to AMD CFO and interim CEO Thomas Seifert.
"The success
of the APUs demonstrates that we have the right strategy," Seifert said.
According to
AMD officials, the updated APP SDK v2.5 offers a key performance enhancement
related to greater bandwidth between the CPU and GPU. With the A-Series APU,
the data-transfer rates are as high as 15GB per second. Other enhancements
focus on gestural interfaces, multi-monitor support, 3D entertainment and
real-time image stabilization, according to AMD.